GigaOM » Soundrop

Spotify app Soundrop relaunches, becomes social music player

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 07:00:51 +0000

The popular Spotify collaborative listening app Soundrop relaunched with a completely revamped service Thursday, offering Spotify users a much tighter social integration that puts Spotify’s own social integration to shame.

But Soundrop 2.0 is more than just bells and whistles: The app’s underlying platform has been rebuilt entirely, foreshadowing much grander ambitions. “It’s a conceptial change of what Soundrop is,” the company’s CEO Inge Andre Sandvik told me during a Skype chat Wednesday. “Suddenly, we are a music player.”

Soundrop has turned into one of the big breakout hits ever since Spotify launched in-client apps close to a year ago, with users playing a total of 300 million tracks by August and the company scoring a $3 million round of funding earlier this year. Its core idea has remained the same: Users can enter listening rooms based on genres, record labels or even artists, and then influence the music programming of a room by voting for tracks – think Turntable.fm meets Reddit.

Now with profile pages

But the new version offers a whole lot more features: Upcoming songs can be previewed, giving users an option to more carefully select the songs they’re voting on. Each room offers a bunch of contextual information, including lists of top tracks and top influencers as well as a kind of popularity meter that shows not just how many people are listening right now, but how that compares to peak times. And users are now getting their own profile pages that show their favorite rooms as well as other activities.

Users can also quickly see which rooms their friends are in at any given time, and a slide-out sidebar offers quick access to room-specific chats and activity feeds. Speaking of which: A personalized, dedicated activity feed will soon be launched as well, showing users who is voting for the tracks they added to a room’s queue and other relevant information.

I’ve already been a regular user of Soundrop’s previous iteration, but I was impressed when Sandvik showed me a screencast of the new Soundrop during our call: Not only is the UI surprisingly cutting edge for what’s basically a web app within another company’s client.

The social integration is also much more thought-through than Spotify’s own approach. Spotify tends to just scour your Facebook contact list and then dump all their recent activity in its sidebar, leaving you with tons of songs from people whose taste in music was already suspect in high school. “90 percent of what your friends are listening to is not relevant to you,” agreed Sandvik. That’s why Soundrop wants to get users to follow folks with similar tastes – something that’s a bit like Rdio’s approach to social music, but within the Spotify client.

Rebuilt in Erlang

To make this happen in real-time, Soundrop rebuilt its entire service from the ground up in Erlang, a programming language developed by Ericsson specifically with real-time communication in mind.

As a result, Soundrop had to retire its mobile apps. However, Sandvik said that he wants to use the new platform to launch a bunch of additional offerings. One of them will be a web-based platform, which could go beyond Spotify and integrate music from other service providers as well. Sandvik didn’t want to reveal too many details about this upcoming offering, but teased: “We can do pretty amazing stuff on the web.”

To hear more about what’s possible when social meets sound on the web, check out my fireside chat with SoudCloud CEO Alex Ljung at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference, coming up on November 5 in San Francisco.

Image courtesy of Flickr user robscomputer.

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First Spotify app gets funded: Soundrop raises $3M

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 07:00:42 +0000

Oslo-based Soundrop became the first Spotify app to attract major funding Tuesday with $3 million a Series A round from original Spotify investor Northzone, a step that further underscores how important discovery is to music subscription services.

Soundrop launched as part of Spotify’s first slate of apps late last year, offering users to join genre- and band-based listening rooms that can be collaboratively programmed. Think Turntable.fm, but without the gimmicky animations and with the power of Spotify’s catalog. Soundrop has been doing well on Spotify’s app platform, with users playing 60 million songs in its more than 7,000 rooms in May alone.

Soundrop co-founder and CEO Inge Sandvik attributed much of this success to one of the key problems a service like Spotify has: It’s great when you know what you want to listen to – but doesn’t expose new music very well. That leads to many people resorting to old favorites instead of discovering new music. “They are listening to the same thing that they have listened to all along,” he said, adding that this wouldn’t warrant paying $10 a month for most people.

Sandvik told me that his company launched all the way back in 2008 with the idea to build Spotify playlists for local bars and coffee shops, something he compared to the idea of the diner jukebox catapulted into the 21st century. Soundrop originally hacked this together based on Spotify’s API, but then launched a much more ambitious take on social music discovery on top of Spotify’s app platform in November.

After concentrating on genre-based rooms first, Soundrop gradually added personalized and private rooms as well as band rooms. Just a few days ago, it officially launched a DJ mode, making it possible for bands and DJs to program their own rooms. One of the first artists to take advantage of this was a duo of Swedish house DJs, who attracted some 80,000 listeners.

But Soundrop’s plans don’t stop with the addition of new listening rooms. The company is also thinking about supercharging other apps on Spotify, many of which could use some help, according to Sandvik. “They are still playlists with a skin on it,” he explained. A forthcoming Soundrop API could help other to make their music apps social and collaborative as well.

Soundrop also plans to extend its reach to the web, allowing users to join rooms outside of the Spotify client. “Our rooms should be able to be embedded everywhere,” Sandvik explained. Of course, that makes even more sense if users can also play music without having access to Spotify, which is why the company is exploring to plug into other services as well. Some of that may even bring videos to Soundrop. “YouTube is a fantastic music service,” said Sandvik.

Soundrop has been bootstrapped until its Series A funding. Its team currently consists of eight people, and Sandvik said that he wants to moderately grow staff to 10 to 12 people.

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Spotify gets more social with Soundrop relaunch

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:55:39 +0000

Music subscription service Spotify got a more refined collaborative social listening experience this weekend, thanks to a relaunch of the Soundrop app within the Spotify client. Soundrop, which allows Spotify users to join “rooms” to listen to playlists together. The update adds an advanced Facebook integration and private rooms to Soundrop, amongst other things.

Soundrop has been one of the more popular apps on Spotify: The Soundrop team told us in January that it was able to gather 265,590 unique visitors within 20 days shortly after launching on Spotify, and the music service revealed last month that Soundrop users streamed a total of 15 million tracks in February.

The new features should help to get Soundrop even more action: Users that log in with Facebook can now see which rooms their friends are in, and invite their friends to join them in private rooms that are not discoverable by others. Rooms can be personalized with artwork and a unique description, and Soundrop is adding search capability to make it easier to find a room. Users have to relaunch their Spotify client to access the new features.

And there is more to come: Soundrop CEO Inge Andre Sandvik told me via email that the company will add localization soon. With the update, users are able to specify their location when launching their own room. Soundrop will use this data to show users rooms nearby in the near future.

Soundrop is one of those apps that bring a more radio-like, curated listening experience to Spotify. That helps the music service with a big downside of music subscription services: Catalogs with millions of songs require active choice — but more often that not, music fans just want to tune in and have songs selected for them.

Check out a few screenshots of the new Soundrop app below:

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First numbers: How successful are Spotify’s apps?

Janko Roettgers — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:58:37 +0000

Are Spotify’s new apps the missing piece to the social music puzzle or merely gimmicks that are ignored by the majority of the company’s users? It has been a month this week since Spotify rolled out its app platform to all of its users, and we thought it might be worth taking a look at how successful the apps currently available through Spotify’s client actually are.

To recap, Spotify officially announced its app platform at a worldwide event in late November, and the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, said at the time that the platform was “bringing music to where it should have been.” The apps themselves are essentially web applications that live within the Spotify client and offer functionalities such as playlist sharing, curated listening and data around music. I was initially pretty disappointed by the platform, but I would be more than happy if the data proved me wrong.

So what kind of traction are Spotify’s apps seeing a month after the launch? The company itself wasn’t available for comment, with a spokesperson’s telling me that Spotify is still in the process of gathering relevant data. However, a few of the dozen or so third-party developers that already have their apps up and running within the Spotify client were more than willing to share their experiences, and this first data actually looks pretty promising:

Moodagent’s app, which offers instant mood-based playlists, has seen about 500,000 unique visitors since its launch on Spotify, according to the company’s head of communications, Casper Falbe, who also gave me the following tidbits: “More than 60% of the visitors keep coming back to use Moodagent, but what’s most impressive is that 43% of the users have been active making playlists more than 200 times each.”
Soundrop’s genre-based chat room app has seen a total of 265,590 unique visitors since Dec. 20. “We’ve had almost 32700 tracks added, 2.4 million tracks played,” Soundrop representative Thomas Ford told me via email, adding, “Soundrop users have played music for a total of 7453 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes and 20 seconds.” He also said that retention has been very good, with 30 percent of all users coming back within one day and 50 percent coming back within two days.
ShareMyPlaylists.com has seen between 6,000 and 10,000 unique visitors per day for its Spotify app. “This has resulted in a 200% increase in new members to our site and a huge 400% increase in playlists uploaded to ShareMyPlaylists.com,” according to the company’s CEO, Kieron Donoghue, who also credits Spotify as being a big contributor to a major milestone. “This week we’ve hit 1 million playlist generated by our Playlist Generator,” Donoghue told me.

This data obviously just offers a glimpse at the initial performance of the Spotify app platform, but it is definitely encouraging, as it seems to suggest that users who try out apps keep coming back to them. It remains to be seen how these numbers will develop once the platform sees a lot more apps than the dozen currently available, and it is still unclear how third-party developers will be able to eventually monetize the traffic within Spotify’s client. But one thing seems to be certain: Spotify users like the functionality provided by apps, and they are eager to find new ways to explore Spotify’s catalog.

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